The family is breaking. The first wicket to fall has been that of the parliamentary affairs minister, Madanlal Khurana; there had been many convincing appeals before this though. The resignation of Khurana cannot be taken in isolation as just the putting in of papers of another minister; he has resigned on the very issue over which the nation is now in ferment. Khurana has pointedly accused the Sangh Parivar of meddling in matters of governance and said that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is being cornered into submission and that the Cabinet is being run by proxy by the Family. Khurana also said that he was being ``forced into martyrdom'' by the ``inaction'' of Vajpayee.

What is more important is that this is the first time that a BJP heavyweight has publicly given vent to his feelings to the interference of the Parivar and said in unequivocal terms that the brand of Hindutva now being actively pursued by the Government was not in consonance with any sort of democratic and secular functioning. For the first time, the very validity of Hindutva as a concept has been challenged by no less than a Union minister belonging to the BJP. The slip is finally showing.

The Prime Minister is trying to hide his government's shame. For one, for the first time in post-Independent India, a Prime Minister had to go down on his knees in atonement over government media and appeal to the people to ``forgive'' the misadventures of his government vis-a-vis the recent horrific killing of a missionary in Orissa . He chose quite an opportune day; the death anniversary of Gandhi-ji, observed by this country as ``Martyrs' Day.'' Not quite coincidentally though, it was this same Parivar which killed Gandhi-ji and may soon take its toll on our powerless Prime Minister.

The chinks in the coalition are also showing. The Telugu Desam and AIADMK are expected to shortly withdraw support from the Government while the Trinamul Congress has made its intentions clear too by calling the government all sorts of names. The Bengal chief minister, Mr Jyoti Basu, has summed up the situation in his own typical fashion; calling the BJP a ``party of barbarians,'' Mr Basu has said that it is high time that all the ministers went Khurana's way.